Monday, March 14, 2016

MARCH 9, 2016By Kevin SamsonWhen
events that were formally considered conspiracy theories become the
foundation of popular culture, you know an entirely new reality is being
created. The 5th bestselling board game in the world is now embracing
the onset of the cashless society.The war on cash in
the real world is taking place on many fronts – from penalizing the
holding of it through negative interest rates; eradicating
large-denomination banknotes; surveillance of it through Suspicious
Activity Reports; or outright banning larger transactions.Perhaps
recognizing that today’s children might very soon not understand how to
even use cash – or maybe to help to speed up their education and
acceptance – the Monopoly board game is certainly living up to its name
by promoting a future of centralized bank surveillance and management.
Fittingly, the new version calls itself “Ultimate Banking.”Monopoly
has always been a game of dominance through property acquisition,
involuntary rent, and bankrupting the opposition to ultimately control
every aspect of an economy. Its 100-year-plus popularity in more than
100 countries and nearly 40 languages speaks to its global role in
either social commentary or social engineering.Monopoly
presented its first digital versions in the post-2005 era beginning
with cash replaced by Visa-branded debit cards. Further modernization of
gameplay replaced their iconic tokens with choices like a Segway,
flat-screen TV or a space shuttle, instead of a ship, car, or
wheelbarrow. This eventually morphed into a full electronic banking unit
that digitized the scorekeeping, thus eliminating the “black-market
element” of hidden cash and other means of presumably fudging the
numbers.Today’s version goes one step further, again
in tandem with society at large taking its next steps toward a full
cashless reality where surveillance is openly admitted to. Instead of
the slower manual entering of transactions into the central keypad, all
properties come with a scanable barcode that, when purchased, will be
automatically deducted from a player’s funds. The same applies to rent
payments – everything is done by barcode and automatic deduction. In
this way, not only are transactions accounted for, but the players
themselves are integrated into the central banking database.According
to PYMNTS.com, the transfer of traditional tabletop gaming has been
trending toward the high-tech for some time, trying to keep pace with
its video game counterparts. These platforms are being embraced by the
public in record numbers:According to an article from
ICv2, a firm that reports on the “Business of Geek Culture,” the hobby
board game industry climbed to $880 million dollars in 2014, which
marked a 20 percent increase in year-over-year sales.….As
an article by CNBC recently reported, board game projects are attracting
tens of thousands of fans on online crowdfunding sites, some amassing
millions of dollars in only a few weeks’ time. The strategy game
“Scythe,” for example, began its Kickstarter campaign in mid-October
with a pledge goal of $33,000 and ended with $1.8 million.….According
to CNBC, BoardGameGeek.com, an online hub for board game hobbyists, was
founded in Jan. 2000 with less than 5,000 users. By Nov. 2015, the site
had grown to 1.15 million users, with roughly 55 million page views per
month.For now – just like in the real world – the
cashless version of Monopoly is optional, but the trend certainly would
indicate that at some point its traditional version will become a mere
relic. And there is still much that can be done to advance its gameplay
further in order to maintain parity with what is being introduced in
modern real-world payment systems … I fully expect that it will be
sooner rather than later when Monopoly will grace us with its “Biometric
Banking” version. Wouldn’t it just be so much more convenient if facial
recognition sped things up a bit more?Google is already working on a
new digital wallet to do just that. After all, how much longer will it
be that kids even know what a credit card is?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCdICCGecbUGary Franchi reports below on Monopoly’s further parallels to real-world banking.